


To Breathe Deep in the Dark

by whatkindofnameisella



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Cannon Typical Mentions of Trauma, Cannon Typical Violence, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, it gets happy at the end tho, some half fic half meta stuff, talks about caleb's time in the sanitorium :(, than you for posting those hiatus prompts to the tag u know who you are, time to get emo about caleb widogast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:20:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23265337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatkindofnameisella/pseuds/whatkindofnameisella
Summary: He'd forgotten what it was like to have a name that was his, before her.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 11
Kudos: 104





	To Breathe Deep in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> prompt fill for the 'names' hiatus prompt! this really got me out of a writing rut I had been in a week, so thank you to the person that posted them in the widojest tag <3 This is a bit of meta, a bit of fic, and a lot of ruminating on what names mean to Caleb Widogast. enjoy :)))

He’d forgotten what it was like to have a name that was his, before her.

When he was younger his name had been something cherished – not because it was unique, not because he was unique, but because it was his, something he could own at a time when he owned next to nothing. It was his identity – what friends called him, what the girls sing-songed as they teased him, what distinguished him from every other farmer boy with ruddy hair and scrawny arms. Though, there wasn’t much need for discerning there – there weren’t too many other children who neglected their chores in favor of scrounging the village for scraps to read under the lantern light like they’d die otherwise (and he felt he would, truthfully, that he would die without it). That was a specificity that belonged to him.

(or so he’d thought)

It was the name his parents had given to him. _Bren_. The name his father called across the field from the stables every morning, the name his mother whispered to him as she stroked his hair and tucked him in at night. Even now, if he imagines it said in one of their voices, it means something rather intangible – cornflower and forget-me-nots, fields of golden grain and blue that encompassed the whole sky. Zemnian spoken easier than common, more often, more sweetly so. Home (and now and then he breathes deep tries to remember that feeling, _home_ ). 

_Bren_. He grew older and that name fermented into something sour. He can still hear Ikithon call out that name in his office, clear and foreboding and solidifying fear like a pit in his stomach and – _idiot, idiot, don't show him you're afraid, don't, and - who in their right mind is afraid of their own name?_ He can hear it called, cast out like a rope to save him from drowning, as another shard of residuum was slid beneath his skin (he was always too dizzied by the pain to grab onto the rope, to have any want to belong to _Bren_ anymore). He can still hear it, sometimes, whispered against his lips in the dead of night by Astrid, convincing him to want to belong to it again – screamed between the explosion of spells; forced, quavering, between clenched teeth as she hurried him out of an anxiety attack in an alcove of Ikithon’s manor; murmured against the back of his hand, held by hers, in the cold. 

He used to imagine that name spoken like a deep roll of thunder in the distance, the type that takes hold of your stomach and forces you to brace for the storm – savored the image of it used to make one want to vomit like it had been made to do for him. He used to imagine that name, even, in the silent parts of night where he would still allow himself to dream, carved into wood on the front of a humble school building, traded like candies of various favor and distaste in the whispers of budding schoolchildren chattering between mahogany desks arranged in neat rows – used to imagine it spoken fondly, knowingly, overbrimming with respect. It feels like a child’s daydream now. He supposes it was, wasn’t it.

(He still takes the time to imagine that one, every now and again, in the times when he’s left to stare at his bedroom ceiling, although with a different name. It makes him blush to think of how it warms something inside him – would sooner die than admit that he still holds on to what seems a childish fantasy. He dares to whisper it, sometimes, when he looks at his hands and sees something other than virulence clinging there. _Professor_ – he starts, and stops because he is thirty-three and whispering dreams to his bedroom ceiling – _Professor Widogast_. It is barely more than a whisper, would easily get lost in the slightest wind. _Professor Widogast_. He smiles, faintly, because these days he feels he’s forgotten just quite how to. There’s something light floating around inside him, something new and something – something he has only ever started to feel again with _her_.)

But that name is long since gone – when he says it, now, it leaves a sour taste left in his mouth, makes him gag and start to shake. He’d rather not it be his anymore.

He lost it, anyways, in the asylum. Time blended and so did he – his name, his face, his hands, his godforsaken body (and it was forsaken, it was). He belonged to nothing but the scratches on the wall, the screams that ripped his throat raw and the bruises that tracked up his arms – those things defined him more than any name. And when his mind was cleared and he could remember, could look in the faint reflection of the window and notice himself past the scratches and screams and bruises – when he could finally look down to his hands and see the blood stained there, stuck beneath the fingernails – he picked up that word, _Bren_ , apologized to his poor mother and father (ignored the tears that rolled down his cheeks), and threw it in the _gotverdamnt_ trash. He couldn’t ever be Bren again. Not, at least, for a long time.

So he had no name. Came to the first town he could find, mud and blood clinging to his clothes, and made a mental list of every name he’d ever heard called across the pastures while he sat and shivered in a ditch. He crossed them off with each house he ran to and from – Peter, a night he snuck into a coop and snapped the neck of the first chicken he could get his hands on; Philip, a drunk man he burned in the calf while he rummaged the man’s pockets, smothering his screams as he lay writhing on the ground; Ernst, a woman he seduced into buying him breakfast (he left her before he had to fulfill his promise – for all his talk she didn’t deserve someone as horrible as him); Hans and Yannik and Otto and half a dozen others, names and personalities he shed like skin and left behind, and eventually he came to – 

Caleb. _Caleb_ , he gave to Nott, slipping routine from his tongue, another name to be crossed off the list. _Caleb Widogast_. He lived as _Caleb_ for a few weeks, the grime and beard accumulating to his face until – yes, that’s good, he can look into the mirror and forget exactly who the name, if any, belongs to anymore. _Caleb_ , that name belonged to somebody who had started existing the moment he met a goblin on the edges of a small farming village, somebody who had no past and no future, somebody who would sleep in the mud under the stars and not want for anything more, who would disappear soon (and the more she said it, the more it became his, the more it was wonderful – _Caleb_ , a name and face and hands that were not his, not as bloodied, at least). Caleb.

And then came Jester Lavorre.

She says it first while shaking her hand in the air, a half smile on her lips and a crinkle to her violet eyes that suggests she almost knows something about him he doesn’t, not yet, in this one (simple, invasive, stupid, meaningless, _meaningful_ , and he will never tell her that, that he dumbly finds this _meaningful_ ) moment. “Hello, Cayyy-leb,” She says, drawing out that first syllable, awkward and teasing, and – oh, he finds himself thinking, for the first time, that sounds nice, the way she says it, that _sounds nice_. He is not Caleb, or, has not been, ever, but – maybe, just maybe, he is now. For now. While this kaleidoscope of blue and violet and green and _mischief_ , he knows, within a minute of meeting her, _mischief_ , is sitting right in front of him. 

(she turns back to her friends and – that’s weird, he – misses her, longs for the way she has just disarmed him and made him squirm, again, and – he must really be broken, mustn’t he, if he cannot wait for her to smile at him again)

(just one more time, that would be nice)

She stays, though. They all do. And they – she – call him that name. 

( _my name_ , he has to repeat to himself over and over again in the dead of night, when Nott has fallen asleep, when the people keeping watch are too busy chatting to notice him whispering into the black, when he is left alone to his room in Xhorhaus, _my name, my name, my name_ )

She says his name in many ways, if always drawing out that ‘a’ – wiggling her eyebrows with a lilt to her voice, screamed until her throat runs raw when he crumples to the ground, bloodied and butchered till dead. His name is chopped up between giggles as she shakes him awake with Nott in the foggy mornings and listed between those of their companions as she tallies them off on her fingers. His name is even murmured as purple tinges her cheeks (and that he must be imagining, must be something left over from the insanity, because _he_ does not make _her_ blush, no, he should not be able to) as she says good night to him, as she talks to him of hopes and failures in dim evenings they have shared across Wildemount. And he is pathetic and a fool because each time she says it he feels a little bit more as if he has something that belongs to him again, as if he is _Caleb_ because she calls him _Caleb_ and he cannot help but believe her, would never dream of letting her down by being anyone else ever again. 

(and _Caleb_ , he imagines her saying, caught in his arms, sheltered in the crook of his neck - waking, messy and unkempt and _beautiful_ , she is always _beautiful_ , in the morning sunlight. _Caleb_ , and this is his name, his face and his hands, bloodied and broken and healing, _Caleb, Caleb, Caleb_.) 

He breaths deep, now and then, and thinks of the way she says it. _Caleb_. He finds it means something rather intangible – goblins (or, rather, halflings) and stubborn monks, the crackle of bonfire and the chatter of stories, hugs that leave him uncomfortable and horribly awkward and quietly awaiting the next one. Giggles that ring in his ears and magic that does not burn him the way it did before and jokes that remind him what it is like to laugh and – hands that hold his, grins that leave him aching and eager to cause the next one, blues and violets and inks and paints and flowers, gods, he never knew how much he loved flowers, isn’t that strange, and – _Caleb_ said more hopefully than _Bren_ ever could be, more lovingly, more sweetly so. A room that is his, books that are his, inks and papers and clothing and – whispered good nights, held hands and wounds, finally starting to heal, that are his. Family, he realizes, _home_ , and that’s horrible and lovely and oh – shit – he’s starting to cry now, isn’t he, and – when was the last time he did that? _Home_. 

_Caleb_ , they call, and he turns without having to remind himself that they mean him, they mean their friend. _Caleb_ , she smiles, and – oh, gods – he feels like a person again. He was not supposed to be happy again, not supposed to – not supposed to be anything more than some nameless, faceless, horrible _thing_ that would wake up overtaken by the ground someday, and yet – 

“Caleb,” he whispers to himself, some nights, staring up at the ceiling, that funny new feeling floating around in his chest – pressing, awfully and sweetly, against his heart. “My name is Caleb Widogast.”

**Author's Note:**

> ps I wanted to put some stuff in here about Jester & her name stuff but it was never organic and every time I tried I realized I was just rewriting stuff from my fic 'Genevieve' so. if u want more angst about how these two have some poetic shit going on with the idea of names. u can go and look @ that. hope you enjoyed! <333


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